Tips and Tricks for leveraging NetApp Storage with Veeam Chris M Evans Technology Analyst, Subject Matter Expert (Storage & Virt), Writer and Blogger Tips and Tricks for leveraging NetApp Storage with Veeam Contents Introduction and executive summary . 3 NetApp Data ONTAP key features . 4 Write Anywhere File Layout . 4 NetApp Data ONTAP and VMware vSphere . 5 Efficient backups in virtual environments . 5 Veeam and VADP . 6 NetApp Data ONTAP storage platform support . 7 Benefits for the small/medium enterprise . 9 About the Author . 10 About Veeam Software . 10. © 2015 Veeam Software 2 Tips and Tricks for leveraging NetApp Storage with Veeam Introduction and executive summary NetApp® FAS storage platforms provide small and medium enterprises significant operational benefits through the use of innovative operational features that cover the needs of data efficiency and data protection . With the latest release of Veeam® Availability Suite™, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication™ v8, customers can use the Storage System Support features to both perform backup and restore tasks that significantly reduce the RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) when operational efficiency is at its most critical — while recovering data . NetApp’s flagship Data ONTAP storage operating system provides features to both optimize and protect data, such as data deduplication and snapshots . Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots™ can be combined with additional Data ONTAP features such as SnapVault® and SnapMirror® to provide a VM (virtual machine) image archive . Veeam Backup & Replication can exploit these archives to provide enhanced data protection and recovery capabilities . Recovery can be in the form of an entire virtual machine (Instant VM Recovery), individual files or application objects from Microsoft platforms such as Active Directory . Two new NetApp-specific storage systems’ related features have been integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication . Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots provides the ability to use hardware-based snapshots on NetApp FAS systems as sources for backup . This feature still uses a VMware snapshot, but only for a fraction of the time compared to regular backups . For customers using NetApp Snapshot, Veeam software allows backups to be secured from snapshots in a timely and efficient fashion, compared to using VMware snapshots in vSphere, by moving them to another physical location to mitigate primary storage hardware failures . These backups are then treated as normal backup images within the Veeam ecosystem and are storage agnostic . For the cost-conscious small/medium enterprise using VMware vSphere, Veeam Backup & Replication provides the ability to move the backup capability from the hypervisor to the storage hardware, which reduces the load and impact on the virtual host when taking snapshots . This also allows for improved RPOs . During the restore process, RTOs improve as data is recovered directly from snapshots with minimal storage system overhead . During both backup and recovery, Veeam Backup & Replication manages the entire process . This greatly reduces the operational impact for small/medium enterprises (SMBs) where money and time are precious resources . © 2015 Veeam Software 3 Tips and Tricks for leveraging NetApp Storage with Veeam NetApp Data ONTAP key features NetApp Data ONTAP is NetApp’s flagship storage OS (operating system), which has been delivering data efficiency and data protection features for over 20 years . Today NetApp Data ONTAP 8 is delivered in either 7-mode (supporting legacy environments) or C-mode (previously known as cluster-mode), which provides greater scalability and resilience than 7-mode systems . One of the advantages of NetApp Data ONTAP is all systems run the same software (subject to licensing) and are able to run the same features, from the low-end FAS2000 series to the FAS8000 . Write Anywhere File Layout Data ONTAP uses a feature known as WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) to map out on-disk data structures . LUNs and files are stored on disk at a 4KB level of granularity, irrespective of the size of the volume itself . System metadata is used to track the location of each LUN or file in terms of the 4 KB block components, which do not have to sit physically contiguous on disk . Data in WAFL is never overwritten in place . Instead, new data is written to a free 4 KB block in another part of the container used to store volumes known as an aggregate . The process of always writing data to new locations is the foundation for all of NetApp Data ONTAP’s data optimization and protection features, including thin provisioning, data de-duplication, Snapshots, SnapMirror and SnapVault . • Thin provisioning is a space-reduction technology that optimizes physical-space utilization by ensuring that only valid data written by a host system is stored on disk . WAFL enables the use of thin provisioning through the use of aggregates and FlexVols . An aggregate serves as a collection of physical RAID groups, providing a pool of physical storage . FlexVols are logical volumes created within an aggregate . Thin provisioning is implemented by allocating physical space on an aggregate on-demand as data is written to a FlexVol . • Data de-duplication, or dedupe, is a process that eliminates duplicate or redundant copies of data within a storage system . In Data ONTAP, dedupe is implemented within each aggregate, using WAFL metadata pointers to track multiple volumes pointing to the same physical data . The write-new process of WAFL ensures that updates to any volume referencing a shared de-duplicated data block will simply be written to a new location with no additional system overhead . • Snapshot is a Data ONTAP feature that creates point-in-time copies of volumes and LUNs . The snapshot process is space efficient, with the difference between any two snapshots consisting of only the updated blocks of data from one snapshot to another . Snapshots are stored within the same physical disk space as the volume itself, allowing for rapid recovery from data loss or corruption . • SnapVault is a feature that aggregates multiple snapshot images to create a set of immutable point-in-time backups . A SnapVault volume can be located on a remote system using separate disk storage and it provides a secure backup capability over and above that of simple snapshots . • SnapMirror is a feature that provides the ability to replicate an entire volume or LUN to another physical FAS system . A mirrored volume uses snapshots to synchronize the replication process, optimizing the data replicated to only those blocks that have changed since the last SnapMirror replication was performed . © 2015 Veeam Software 4 Tips and Tricks for leveraging NetApp Storage with Veeam All of these features deliver key requirements for SMBs including: • Efficiency — WAFL operations act at the 4 KB-level of granularity, storing only changed data and providing the ability to thin-provision and de-duplicate, which are features that provide significant space savings for virtualized environments . • Performance — Snapshot functionality is executed with little or no system overhead, because all functions are achieved through manipulating metadata that maps to logical volumes (LUNs and file shares) on disk data structures . This includes the deletion or expiring of snapshots, where freed data blocks are reclaimed by the NetApp Data ONTAP operating system through a garbage-collection process . • Scalability — NetApp Data ONTAP allows up to 255 unique snapshots per volume with each volume based on a custom schedule . Snapshots can be created to hourly, daily or weekly basis . NetApp Data ONTAP and VMware vSphere NetApp Data ONTAP integrates well into VMware vSphere virtual storage environments . Typically, SMB deployments use NFS (Network File System) as the protocol to present storage to vSphere from a Data ONTAP system . NFS can be deployed over standard Ethernet switches and is, therefore, at a lower cost compared to deploying Fibre-Channel, which requires bespoke hardware, including HBAs and optical cabling . NFS datastores are, by default, thin-provisioned, so they start efficiently from day one . Efficient backups in virtual environments The approach to making backups in virtual environments differs greatly from those in only physical servers . Typically, in a physical environment agents are used to manage the process of reading and transferring backup data over the network from a server (the client) to the backup system . Because physical servers each have their own network connections and storage connectivity, the client typically isn’t a bottleneck when making a backup . Instead, care must be taken to ensure that enough bandwidth exists across the entire network and into the backup server itself . Virtual server environments are different . The initial premise of virtualizing was to reduce the amount of physical resources deployed in the data center . Operating system and application inefficiencies meant that many organizations were deploying a single physical server for a single task, which was expensive and wasteful, not only in acquisition costs of the hardware but in space, power and cooling demands . Deploying agents on every VM in a vSphere environment simply isn’t practical for a number of reasons: • VMs come and go more quickly than physical servers, making the tracking of client licenses for backup more difficult, which could result in over-purchasing software . • Agents require management